'Jesus was a moderniser'

A biography that explores Blair's ideas

12:00AM BST 14 Apr 2001

THE FIRST version of this biography came out in 1995, to wide acclaim, when Tony Blair had just been elected Labour leader. John Rentoul, chief leader writer on The Independent, started out, in his own words, as a "sympathetic observer" of his subject. He has, he now says, become "inevitably a rather less sympathetic one". Over the handling of the Bernie Ecclestone donation, the Millennium Dome and the failed attempt to block Ken Livingstone's election as London Mayor, he is critical of Blair. But he clearly still wants him to succeed.

Blair's political ambition was probably born, Rentoul says, at the age of 11, when his father had a stroke. Leo Blair had always wanted to be Prime Minister (on the Conservative benches) and his son felt an obligation to fulfil the desire. "After his illness my father transferred his ambition on to his kids," Blair is quoted as saying. "I felt I couldn't let him down."

This meticulously researched, well-written book is most revealing about the Prime Minister's early years. According to the author, Blair was almost expelled from school for uncooperative behaviour, appeared as a spear carrier in a school play with Rowan Atkinson, and once answered a question in a maths exam with the word "rhinoceros":

Blair explained cheerfully that he knew the longest side of a right-angled triangle was called something like "hippopotamus" but that that was not right.

There are some devastating photographs of the British leader with shoulder-length hair and flares - during a Mick Jagger period in which, Rentoul says, his catchphrase to girls was, "Let's go, honies." Unfortunately, there is no pictorial evidence of the tight white trousers and brown fur coat described in the text.

An impressive number of old friends and acquaintances have agreed to be quoted on the record, rather than on the usual unattributable basis. Many of them have interesting insights. David Kennedy, one of Blair's old teachers, says:

He has always been conscious of how he appears to other people . . . He is very intelligent and calculating. Don't forget that he was a superb actor.

On Blair's more recent political life, the biography is less revelatory. There are few of the "killer facts" on which lucrative newspaper serialisation deals are based. One explanation is that this Government has already been extraordinarily well chronicled: more biographies, memoirs and "insider accounts" have been published about the Labour administration after four years in power than about any previous Government after the same period of time.

The account of Blair's battle with Gordon Brown for the Labour leadership uses the main characters' versions of events - Paul Routledge's biography of the Chancellor (the official view from the Treasury, which claims that Blair reneged on a deal not to stand against his old friend for the top job) and Donald Macintyre's book about Peter Mandelson (the received wisdom in Notting Hill, which discloses the intensity of the passions at the time).

Rentoul rejects the suggestion that the ambitious young MP would have promised to give way to his rival in all circumstances - that "makes no sense," he says, and concludes:

What is overlooked in all the recent accounts is the fact that support for Blair at all levels in the party and in the country was too great for any rival to resist.

The strength of this biography is in its analysis rather than its personal revelations. It is more Newsnight than Hello!, with as much emphasis on Blair's philosophy as on his life. The description of his faith is particularly interesting. "Jesus was a moderniser," the Prime Minister once said. He and his wife were among the last visitors to Cardinal Hume on his deathbed, Rentoul says, despite the fact that the Roman Catholic leader had forbidden Blair to take communion at his family's church.

Rentoul's conclusion is that Blair has been a "competent" Prime Minister in his first term while making no "great advances", but that he has shown the "confidence . . . and brutality to do more". With further updates, this biography will almost certainly become the definitive one.